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Linux Tycoon is a management game set in the world of the Linux distributions. We will have to create our distribution with the goal of making it the most used and famous in the world.

An interesting thing of this game is the economical plan that its author Bryan Lunduke is “testing”, getting paid by the community for working on open source projects, the goal is to get 4.000 $ in donations every month. In the first month (June 2012) he reached the goal in just 1 week, and so he released this game and other projects he’s working on as GPL software, but sadly just the following month he made a sad post on his blog “Open Source Funded By Donations? Not So Much” where in short he wrote ;

Unfortunately things didn’t quite work out.

, in my point of view this is not a big surprise, I think that a model of recurring donations is not working at the moment, people prefer to spend a bit more just 1 time for a specific goal, than a bit every month.
So perhaps putting a higher goal, like 10/15K $ to release the game under the terms of GPL would be successful and the community would have gained the game as GPL forever, Blender did this and reached the target of 100K $.

So now the game is released as closed source, the good news is that you can have it for just 4 $, but now let’s take a look at the game.